New York, July 16—A shrewd observer in these parts says about Watergate that it is all over. I am not committed to his conclusion, but I find it interesting. Surely the salient datum, tending to corroborate it, is the Gallup Poll. It is quite startling on the subject, reaching to a decisiveness seldom seen in the polls. It says simply this: Nixon is guilty, and should not be removed. Seventy-one per cent of the people believe that Nixon knew about Water- gate and the cover-up. But only 18 per cent believe that the condign punishment is removal from office. Assuming that the figures stand at more or less that level, it wouldn’t make any difference if Mr. Nixon appeared on television and said that he had just come out of a bout of paramnesia that had so disordered his memory on all matters that pertained to Watergate, that come to think of it he had commissioned the bugging, and decommissioned the investigation. It wouldn’t appear to matter, according to Gallup, except that conceivably the public would be all the more pro-Nixon in gratitude for his confirming their intuition that he was guilty.
It wouldn’t matter, according to Gallup, if the Senate Committee uniformly concluded that Nixon was guilty. Granted, the House of Representatives would have the power to hand down a bill of impeachment, which the Senate would be required to try. But the people’s spokesmen are unlikely to proceed athwart the wishes of a people so resolutely aligned against impeachment. The people seem to be saying what I have contended for several months, namely that the impeachment clause of the Constitution is to be used nowadays only in order to remove a President, not to punish him: because to punish him, in most circumstances, is to punish the Republic at large.
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